Two orchestral firsts from one of the greatest composers of the 19th century, Brahms, and one of the greatest composers you’ve probably never heard of: Joseph Boulogne.

Born in Guadeloupe the son of a wealthy planter and his wife’s African slave, Boulogne became a celebrity in Paris where he excelled as a champion horse rider and fencer – for which Louis XV knighted him Chevalier de Saint-Georges – as well as being renowned as a virtuoso violinist, conductor and the first fêted composer from an African background.

His First Symphony is a work of enormous charm, vitality and elegance that was said to have influenced Haydn and Mozart. By turns engaging and warm, serenely beautiful and cheerfully brisk, its three movements are the work of a composer of considerable ability and flair that favourably stands comparison with his more famous peers.

The Serenade No. 1 by Brahms was his first work for ‘large orchestra’. Its symphonic scale and ambition are tempered by its striking blending of ebullience and melancholy, alternatively borrowing from Mozart and Beethoven, to revel in a profusion of attractive themes underpinned by pastoral delicacy and bound together by a bewitching lyricism. No wonder the eminent critic Eduard Hanslick declared it ‘the symphony of tranquillity’.

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